Yonkers Neighbors Saw Arrest Unfolding

YONKERS, Aug. 11—Some of the residents along Pine Street saw it all from the beginning—the waiting, the stalking from rooftops by armed detectives and finally the quick arrest of David Berkowitz when he got into his car.

Others emerged this morning from the Pine Hill Towers, where Mr. Berkowitz occupied a river‐view apartment on the top floor, stunned by the knowledge that they had been living in the same neighborhood, the same building, as the man the police say is the “Son of Sam.”

But few people knew him more than to say, “Yeah, I recognize him.”

To Thelma McDonald, it was just another day of work until she heard from a reporter that Mr. Berkowitz had been arrested in her building. Her eyes widened. She caught her breath. “Would you believe it is a building like this?” she asked. “I'm really frightened.”

So it was with Louise Larry, as she went off to work at the American Bank Note Company. “You thought he was everywhere,” she said. “I'm frightened. I didn't know. I'm still shaking.”

At 2 o'clock yesterday, she said, Plainclothes detectives began watching Pine Street from both ends. Two armed men were on the roof of Pine Hill Towers and another on the roof of the two‐story house across the street. It became a waiting game.

“I mean they were all over the area,” she said.

Just before 10 P.M., she said, David Berkowitz “came out of the building and began walking down the street to his car,” toward her. As soon as he got into his car, she said, three men jumped from a car parked nearer to where she was watching and ran up to Mr. Berkowitz's cream‐colored car.

“They put their guns right to his head,” she said. There was no resistance as they put him in handcuffs, she added.

Mr. Berkowitz's car had been parked outside the bedroom window of 46 Pine Street, and Lou Ellen Burks watched the arrest from a distance of four yards, she said.

“Since early afternoon,” Miss Burks

said, “plainclothes men were everywhere. About 9:45 P.M. [Mr. Berkowitz] walked up to his yellow and black car. Detectives met him, made him put his hands up on the roof of his car and searched him.”

“I hadn't seen him before,” said Miss Burks, who has been helping care for 10 children in the multifamily structure. She and two Roman Catholic nuns have been living there for three years, manning one of several Abbott House groups in the county that care for young people who cannot ??? with their families, she said.

Francisco Resto, a 14‐year‐old paperboy and one of six children in the Resto family that lived across the hall from Mr. Berkowitz, probably knew the arrested man as well as anyone in the building.

“He was a quiet man,” the youth said. “He never bothered us. He would only say hello and how was I. I delivered newspapers to him. He would stand in the doorway so I couldn't see into his apartment.

“He told me he was a security guard.” None of the pictures looked like him. The only thing—he was always walking fast. Now, I feel sorry for him.”

Mr. Resto, his wife, Maria, and their children lived across the hall from Mr. Berkowitz all the time he was in the building. Their apartment faces south, with a patio that overlooks the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge and the Manhattan cityscape.

Mr. Berkowitz's apartment, which the police sealed and would not allow reporters to enter, faced west, having an open view of the Hudson.

The building was recently renovated, and the apartments and hails were carpeted and renewed. The hallway retains its white, clean look, although the orange carpeting has dirt spots.

The building's entrance was also redone with the renovation, and it, too, shows that the tenants care for the area.

Pine Street is a two‐block‐long, Lshaped residential area that runs from Broadway west toward the river and then turns north and intersects with Glenwood Avenue.

Six multifamily dwellings line both sides of the street in addition in the Pine Hill Towers, which has about 16 apartments on each of its seven floors.

Directly across the street from the towers is the rear of another apartment complex, Amakassin Gardens, which faces Broadway and is built of stone and brick in a Gothic style.

Pine Street lies between a section of Broadway in which well‐kept garden apartments and condominiums mark a prospering part of the city and a section that area residents sometimes call “Vietnam.” West of Pine Street, down to the Hudson River, several apartment houses have been burned in the last two years and shops and a large supermarket have closed. Commuters to New York who get off at the Glenwood stop on the Hudson Division line are afraid of walking up Glenwood Avenue late at night.

“I used to see him in the mornings,” Cheryl Preston, a resident of Pine Hill Towers, said of Mr. Berkowitz. “Instead of taking the elevator, he would just run down the stairs. He was always in a rush.”

“He never had any visitors and always kept to himself,” said Mrs. Preston, who works for her father in a store at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. “I thought he was a very nice person.”

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A version of this archives appears in print on August 12, 1977, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Yonkers Neighbors Saw Arrest Unfolding. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe